


Loud Pipes

by volatilehearted (anomalagous)



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: M/M, awkward teenage fumbling, being inside stiles' mind is kind of a carnival ride, completely stream of consciousness angst, love potions, who knows what to call this
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-14
Updated: 2015-08-01
Packaged: 2018-03-30 11:35:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3935320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anomalagous/pseuds/volatilehearted
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Stiles gets a lesson on not putting things that don't belong to him in his mouth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Lately, Stiles had been helping out at the clinic. It was less out of a sense of gregariousness or social responsibility and more out of fealty to a person only tangentially connected to the clinic. Stiles had felt there was an extreme lack of Scotty-time in his life of late, and when he'd pointed that _out_ , he'd gotten the appalling response that was not the expected “ _Oh, of course, Stiles, I'll drop everything to hang out, there's nothing more important to me_ ,” but was instead, “ _Well, there's a lot to be done around the clinic and I hate feeling like I left Dr. Deaton on the hook, plus we could always use the extra money so I'm putting in extra hours_.” Since Scott's moral upstanding-ness had interfered with Stiles' ability to actually spend time with Scott, Stiles had found it necessary to be the one to bend, and to follow Scott along to work with the hope of pestering him there.

Which had, of course, backfired the moment Stiles realized that Deaton had no qualms about putting _Stiles_ to work _too_ , regardless of how many indignant times he brought up things like child labor laws or (more relevantly) fair pay practices. The worst part of it was that it didn't even really result in Stiles seeing any _more_ of Scott. Scott was well suited to heavy-duty manual labor, often occupied moving heavy things around in the back or in from supply shipments. _Stiles_ , on the other hand, had spent an inordinate amount of time in his life organizing chaos. He was useless moving heavy pallets around but very good at reshelving the strange, curious herbs and baubles that Deaton kept around for his 'holistic' practices.

It wasn't as if it was backbreaking work, but trying to apply any kind of organizational system to the closely interwoven cross-sections of 'druid' supplies and 'veterinary' supplies consumed more of his mind and his attention than Stiles expected. He was three-fourths of the way through the Vitamin Water before he'd even realized he'd opened the bottle. The aggressively pink drink had promised him _focus_ , but in all honesty, Stiles didn't expect a whole lot out of something the color of a liquified My Little Pony.

He'd just let the last drops of it roll down his throat when Scott shuffled into the room, arms stretched around a newly delivered palette of doggie butt wipes or _whatever_ Deaton wanted kept in the exam room _now_. There was a deceptive ease in the way he carried the weight of the boxes, rocked back on his hips to help spread the weight, and Stiles was immediately struck with something that felt a lot like indignant jealousy. The box was probably heavy enough that Stiles wouldn't have even been able to lift it, a theory rounded out by the way the exam table shuddered when Scott put it down, but there Scott was, like Adonis, strong enough to casually--

\--wait, that wasn't quite right. Not Adonis. Atlas. _Atlas_. Where had _Adonis_ even come from?

Scott raised one hand to scrub the back of its wrist across his forehead, and then he was grinning at Stiles, looking tired but satisfied with his hard work in the way Stiles always imagined wholesome young farmboys around the turn of the century enjoying hard work. It was disgusting, and Stiles could feel the frown it inspired out of him forming on his face. “What's _that_ look for?”

“Nothing,” Scott assured him, and Stiles had to consider that maybe this was just the kind of face Scott made as an idle animation, that he just went around being _satsified_ with life when nothing was actively getting in the way of that. It was a patently unfair expression and Stiles had no idea how that expression hadn't directly translated into Scott getting a lot more attention of a certain kind than Stiles was entirely comfortable with. “What's Deaton got you doing in here?”

“Reorganizing his pantry, basically.” Stiles scowled, turning back towards the bottles on the table. “And endless friggen parade of teas and dried flowers and God only knows what else. It's terrible. It's the worst. Please tell me we can get out of here soon and go do almost _literally_ anything else?”

Chuckling, Scott smiled and shook his head. He looked down at the exam table briefly and then looked up to Stiles, reaching up to pat at his shoulder. “Soon. I've got like three or four more palettes to move, and then _I'm_ done. Hopefully in the time it takes me to do that, you can leave all of this in a state that makes at least a little sense to Deaton. Okay?”

Stiles frowned, peering at the supplies Scott had set on the table. All he wanted to be doing was playing Grand Theft Auto or watching any one of their dumb shows on Netflix. “Okay. Sounds good.”

Another pat to his shoulder, and Scott was back out the door, probably to toss around hay bales or cheerfully carry pigs while singing to them or whatever he did when he was busy being the perfect male hybrid of a Disney Princess and Rosie the Riveter.

Trying to settle himself, Stiles squared his shoulders and turned back to the bottles on the counter, sliding them around to sort them into various categories like 'actual modern medicine' and 'people probably won't freak out if you rub it on their dog' and 'for werewuffs only' and 'seriously Deaton why the fuck do you even have this?'. There were way too many bottles in the last category for Stiles' tastes, which is mostly to say that there were _any_.

He said as much when Deaton came into the room two thirds of the way through the sorting process, not so much as looking up as he pointed to the rows of little brown bottles. “Why do you have so many things that could kill me if I breathed them in wrong? Is this kind of twisted druidic survivalist challenge?”

The answer he got was _not_ the answer Stiles was expecting, even solving for the unwritten rule that Deaton was _never_ going to give him a straight answer. “What happened to the potion that was sitting on the counter?”

Stiles turned and looked at the empty end of the counter where Deaton pointed. He looked up at Deaton's face, blinking slowly. With immense articulation and command of the English language, he said, “Huh?”

Deaton continued to point like that would somehow explain the situation differently. “The potion that was right here. Where did you put it?”

“...do you mean the _Vitamin Water_ you left for me?”

Silence reigned, and Deaton just _stared_ at Stiles without blinking nearly enough.

It was unsettling, but not enough to explain the sudden dread that was starting to gnaw at the pit of Stiles' stomach. He looked at the counter, and then back up to Deaton's blank face. “...that wasn't Vitamin Water, was it?”

Deaton shook his head.

“That was your potion, wasn't it?”

Deaton nodded.

“I wasn't supposed to drink that, was I?”

The sigh Deaton gave was nothing short of longsuffering, and ended with his face in his hand. “ _Stiles_.”

“Okay, in _my defense_ , it was in a _Vitamin Water_ bottle and it looked _exactly like_ Vitamin Water, how was I supposed to know?”

Raising his eyebrows faintly, Deaton moved to the end of the counter, bending over to retrieve the now-empty Vitamin Water bottle from the trash. He sniffed at it, and sighed heavily, his head shaking again. “Perhaps you could start with not drinking things that don't belong to you.”

Stiles felt something sink down through his ribcage as Deaton put the empty bottle down on the counter where it had been. “Well, let's not be unreasonable,” He murmured, before his eyes jolted back up to the druid's somber expression. “...what's gonna happen to me?”

“Who have you seen since you drank it?”

The question seemed entirely out of left field and entirely unrelated to the topic at hand. Stiles frowned, sharply, hoping that the jagged edges of it would prick at Deaton's sensibilities and make the truth bleed out. “Look, I know you've probably got some kind of unhelpfully vague druid aphorism monthly quota to meet, but _honestly_ , if I'm going to like _die_ or _change into a toad_ or go _blind_ or something, I'd really rather know _now_.”

Deaton inclined his head ever so slightly, the way he seemed to do when he thought there was something interesting about a situation that he wasn't going to share with the class. “It was a love potion, Stiles. You aren't going to die, but there might be consequences anyway.”

“You make _love potions_?” Stiles asked, incredulous, glancing over his shoulder in search of a camera crew or someone famous to come out of some secret passage and tell him he was in the process of being punked, “Like honest to God, Love Potion Number Nine, drink it and lose your free will kind of love potions? Isn't that kind of...you know, _not exactly_...”

“I maintain the balance,” Deaton explained, as if that _was_ an explanation. “But right now I need to understand your situation, so you need to answer my question, Stiles. Did you see anyone else before I came in? How long has it been since you drank the potion?”

Stiles shrugged in a way that allowed his arms to swing free, an excess of motion to cope with his excess of nervousness. “I don't know how long it's been, I was trying to actually focus on getting stuff done so we could get _out_ of here. But, yeah, Scott came in just before you did, dropped off the box on the table there.”

The epiphany was a physical thing that occupied space on Deaton's face, even accounting for how stoic and reserved his expressions usually were. It made a bezoar of anxiety start to form on the floor of Stiles' stomach. “What?”

Turning back to the counter, Deaton swept the bottle back off of it and into the trash. “How do you feel? Anything different?”

“Other than the crippling paranoia that I'm going to grow rabbit ears or start vomiting up crickets because of your _weird druid potion_ that you masked as a _completely safe consumable product_?”

“I meant about your conversation with Scott. Nothing strange or out of the ordinary?”

Stiles didn't like the implication. It gnawed at him, so he decided to ignore it. “No, it was fine. It was completely and one hundred percent normal. The most normal conversation a guy could have with his werewolf best friend. Absolutely blandly _normal_. Okay?”

Deaton just laughed. “Stiles, I think you're going to be _just_ fine.”

 


	2. Chapter 2

It was more than twenty-four hours later and Stiles was in the relative comfort of his own home before he realized _why_ Deaton had been asking the specific, pointed questions he'd been asking.

Deaton thought Stiles should be in love with Scott. _Would_ be in love with Scott.

The thing—he didn't want to call it a problem, Stiles wasn't sure they were in 'problem' territory yet—about _that_ was that Stiles was quite certain he didn't feel any differently about Scott.

He spent forty-eight hours or better examining that from the inside, peering at every internal twinge when Scott would smile or when he would frown. It wasn't new, it wasn't even that strange; Stiles took his job as best friend very seriously, he had for years. Being finely tuned to the frequencies of Scott's feelings, having plugged in his own response to each of them like Scott was some kind of power source of human emotion that Stiles had to pull from to experience any at all. The way his chest tightened with an ember-hot, furious desire to tear someone's skin from their bones any time Scott started to look like he was feeling like he didn't carry _enough_ of the world's ridiculous weight on his shoulders, that was nothing new. That had happened for _years_. His possessive protectiveness of the Alpha had started well before he'd ever _become_ an Alpha, and it was well-known. Publicly documented. Probably archived somewhere in the Library of Congress.

Nothing had changed, which meant Deaton's potion couldn't have worked. Relief flooding his veins like liquid coolant, Stiles called the veterinruid up to tell him just that.

The laugh he got in response was just smug enough for Stiles to find it _thoroughly_ insulting.

“I'm not a thousand percent in love with your _tone_ , Doctor Deaton.” Stiles muttered into the phone, propping it up on one shoulder as he shuffled through papers and print-outs to try and determine which should go on the speculation board and which should get thrown away.

The sound of laughter hadn't quite left Deaton's voice, even though he was speaking words at this point. “Which is nothing new or uncommon, Stiles. The fact of the matter is, I gave another dose of the same batch of potion to its intended recipient, to great success. The potion was quite effective, I assure you.”

“It still creeps me out that you give love potions to people.” Stiles angled away from the seriousness of the conversation almost on instinct, feeling his face scrunch up around a distasteful expression.

“I maintain the balance.” Deaton repeated his earlier assurance, and just as before, did not explain any more fully. “The fault you think you are perceiving was not in the potion, Stiles. Maybe you should look elsewhere for an explanation.”

Stiles' expression tightened further, and for a few seconds all he could see was the darkness of his own annoyance. “Like _where_ elsewhere?”

There was a sound over the connection which Stiles had begun to associate overtly with Deaton being a cryptic dick. “You are a smart, educated young man with a knack for problem-solving, Stiles. I'm sure you'll think of something. Now, if you'll excuse me, I _do_ have patients to attend to.”

No amount of insisting that he _did not,_ in fact, excuse Deaton would make the druid stay on the line. Stiles was left staring at his cell phone in abstract frustration. It was downright _wearying_ how having the _capacity_ to figure 'it' out, regardless of the 'it', seemed to make people automatically assume that he _wanted_ to spend his time on it.

There were a lot of moments in Stiles' life over the past couple of years that he felt could have been made exponentially less annoying if people—mostly Deaton—had just _explained_ things to Stiles instead of expecting him to catch up on his own.

Flopping back onto his bed in frustration, Stiles gave his phone a little toss just to get it out of reach and remove the temptation to bombard Deaton with texts until the druid's will crumpled. With other people, Scott especially, that tactic would have worked, but so far Stiles had not found whatever magic combination of logic and obnoxiousness that could break Deaton's resolve. He would be getting no more information from that particular avenue. He wasn't about to go admitting what had happened to anyone _else_ in the pack, least of all Lydia, no matter how much of a help she might have been, so that meant that Stiles was truly on his own.

As much as Stiles would like to simply assume the potion hadn't _worked_ , it wasn't something he could just brush away or under the rug. While Deaton could be evasive or unnecessarily mysterious, Stiles was almost certain he'd never caught Deaton in an outright lie. The puzzle still needed solving, and with Deaton's outright, unmuddied assurance that the potion should have worked, Stiles was forced to seek another solution.

The next most obvious solution seemed to be that the potion didn't work _specifically on Stiles_ for some reason. The only problem with _that_ answer was that Stiles couldn't figure out why or _how_ he'd be immune to something like that. It certainly wasn't a systemic immunity to the magical bullshit that had invaded his life, because Stiles could remember quite clearly the hallucinations he'd seen due to the aconite in the punch at Lydia's party, as acutely as he could remember any of the times his body had been seized up and made useless by the venom of the kanima's claws. Being _immune_ would have been _useful_ , so of course fate hadn't handed him that card. He wasn't immune to _jack_.

Stiles' mind flashed back briefly to a night almost two years ago, out in the preserve by an oil can bonfire, when he and Scott discovered that werewolves don't get drunk. He'd learned then, he supposed, that he was _especially_ not immune to Jack.

 _Damn_ , he was funny. It was too bad nobody was around to appreciate it. Stiles could all but visualize down to the pixel level the combination of exasperation and fondness that would have overtaken Scott's face at that one.

Stiles' mental wheels spun in the mud for another half an hour or more, unable to find traction on what might have happened. He couldn't think of an explanation, and before long he was suspended delicately in the dichotomy of being easily distracted and being unable to let riddles go, strung up like the fly on the spider's web. A tug from either direction might cause him to fall, and yet he knew if he stayed in place it might consume him.

Maybe that wasn't such a bad idea.

He let himself drift, thoughts wandering away from the potion for the time being. Nostalgia washed up in the wake of the worrying, and Stiles found himself mired in it, beached up against the memory of a time before things became more a legitimate struggle to survive than a hyperbolic teenage metaphor for it. He smiled through the images of himself and Scott against the world, when their limbs were thinner and Scott's hair was longer and their biggest worries of an entire summer were related to how far they could get on a pedal bike before Scott's asthma decided they weren't going any further. Those memories had a sense of home and belonging to them that, some days, Stiles wasn't sure he'd ever get back to. He missed it, like he missed knowing that he was the only thing Scott needed or needed to worry about to get by. He'd liked the focus, the attention, the sense of being important rather than impotent.

It wasn't until the tides of his mind had washed him up against the shores of sleep and Stiles was _almost_ unconscious when the epiphany struck up at him like a shark and dragged him under the waves.

Maybe the potion hadn't worked on him because he was _already in love_.

 


	3. Chapter 3

He woke as if he were waking in the middle of a scream. Suddenly, all at once, and with the breath crushed from his lungs like they were in the middle of doing something more important than breathing.

He was in love with Scott.

He was _in love_ with his _best friend_.

Stiles sat straight up in his bed and immediately brought both hands up to rub their palms over his face. This was going to ruin _everything_.

Par for the course, in some ways. Stiles was good at ruining. He was an utter _ruiner_.

He was sheened in the cold sweat he’d woken on the tail end of and desperately needed a shower.

Some things, at least, hadn’t changed. _Some things_ were rote, and Stiles could probably have managed to do them in his sleep. He _hadn’t_ , obviously, but he probably could have. Maybe he should stop thinking about all the things he’d be able to do while _unconscious_ and focus on the _actual problem_. Or maybe he should try not to think about it at all.

He stripped out of his night shirt and pajama pants and left them in a crumpled mess on his bed. The underwear got chucked near--not quite _in_ \--the hamper by the door, to be replaced by the loose wrap of a towel slung over his hips for the short trip between his room and the bathroom just  down the hall. Stiles measured his steps and measured his breathing and tried not to _think_ about measuring anything at _else_ as he slipped into the shower and let the water beat down on his head and shoulders. He braced one hand against the shower wall and closed his eyes, which was of course when his mind caught up with him, checking back in to remind him that yes, he was all but certain now, he was in _love_ with _Scott_.

It had been easy when he hadn’t _realized_ it, he supposed, but now that it was there, fully formed in the front of his mind like Athena waiting to be born, he couldn’t ignore it. He couldn’t overlook how he _felt_ , when Scott did something as simple as reach out to touch his shoulders, how his heart clenched when the alpha looked up at Stiles with a certain light in his eyes. Stiles couldn’t fight how his entire being responded when his name was shaped inside of Scott’s mouth.

A shudder ran down his spine. Stiles’ fingers spasmed against the tile of the shower as he realized he could feel his body quickening just at the _memories_ of Scott, bare-chested in the sun and dewed with his own sweat as they practiced lacrosse over the summer. At _thoughts_ of Scott’s warm eyes and broad-palmed hands sliding over his own, the dizzy-giddy feeling when Scott stole his pain away, the comfort that Scott could tap into Stiles’ skin with those fingertips like it was some kind of morse code that only Scott had ever known. He couldn’t let himself wonder what the inside of Scott’s mouth tasted like or how it might feel to have those arms bracket him in a different way, or he was going to--

\--no, no, it was too late for that, Stiles realized as he came out of his head with a start. He was already hard. _Painfully_ hard.

For a few moments, Stiles tried to tell himself it was just conditioning, it was just morning wood combined with his body having learned long before today that _shower_ meant _jerking off_. He managed to chase that logic train for about three whole seconds before he felt himself realize that wasn’t true either. No, no, regardless of whatever other boners he might have gotten in the shower in the past, this boner, _this_ magnificent _pillar_ of unfulfilled satisfaction, was for _Scott_.

He had a _Scott boner_. How had he gotten to a place where _Scott boners_ were a thing? How had he gotten so _far_ without realizing where he was?

He should leave it alone. Leaving it alone would be the best. Leaving it alone would keep him from encouraging it. Stiles huffed water out of his face and straightened, reaching for the shampoo. He just had to ignore it and it would go away and he wouldn’t be the awful kind of person who secretly jacked off in the shower to the thought of his best friend.

Stiles got all the way through washing and rinsing his hair and was on to the body-wash portion of the shower before he accidentally brushed against himself with one wrist and discovered he absolutely _was_ that awful kind of person.

It probably meant he was going to some special kind of hell, the fact that he just _gave in_ so easily, the fact that he ended up leaning against the wall with his shoulders and the top of his head, trying to swallow down every desperate, greedy noise his chest wanted to offer up. One hand stripped his cock with a ruthless, unremitting rhythm and the other wandered between his legs to tease at his balls, but it was his _mouth_ that Stiles felt was the most damned part of him, whispering Scott’s name like a secret between his whimpers.

He came with a jolt all over the shower wall, and it wasn’t until he’d finished that Stiles wished he’d had the foresight to at least do this on the wall that he could actually rinse off with the showerhead.

Head hung, he looked down at himself, at the mess he’d made, at the way some part of him still twitched and shivered, unsatisfied with the shape and the color of the hands that had brought him off. Stiles screwed up both eyes and tipped his mouth down into a frown.

He was in so much trouble.

  


 


End file.
